Tami Simon: Welcome to Insights at the Edge, produced by Sounds True. My name’s Tami Simon, I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I’d love to take a moment to introduce you to the new Sounds True Foundation. The Sounds True Foundation is dedicated to creating a wiser and kinder world by making transformational education widely available. We want everyone to have access to transformational tools such as mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion, regardless of financial, social, or physical challenges. The Sounds True Foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to providing these transformational tools to communities in need, including at-risk youth, prisoners, veterans, and those in developing countries. If you’d like to learn more or feel inspired to become a supporter, please visit soundstruefoundation.org.
You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Mark Nepo. Mark Nepo is a poet, philosopher, and the author of more than 20 books, who has taught in the fields of poetry and spirituality for over 35 years. As a cancer survivor, Mark devotes his writing and teaching to the journey of inner transformation and the life of relationship. With Sounds True, Mark has published the award-winning Things that Join the Sea and the Sky, and a new book called Drinking from the River of Light: The Life of Expression. Mark Nepo is one of the most prolific transformational writers that I know, and in this conversation he shares why. Not because he’s writing about what he knows, but because he’s writing about what is alive for him in his experience and in his heart at the moment—what’s alive that he wants to explore further. For anyone like me, who wants to deepen their life of expression, this is a tremendously insightful and helpful conversation with Mark Nepo.
Your new book, Mark, with Sounds True, is on the life of expression, and that’s what I want to talk with you about. To begin with that phrase, “the life of expression”—what do you mean by that?
Mark Nepo: Yes. You know from my work and just from our friendship, I’m a long-term—over 30 years—cancer survivor, and I think my whole understanding of expression got turned upside down when I was blessed to make it through all that. Before that, I was a driven young artist, hoping if I worked hard enough, maybe, maybe, I’d write one or two great poems, and contribute something. And then, all of a sudden, expression was a rope I climbed every day to still be here. Forget writing great things, forget anybody reading them. It became part of how to be here, and so, on the other side, I was open to really the healing journey of expression rather than the journey to produce great art.
That led me to this whole different way of feeling about it all, and I think one of the images that’s central to the whole journey of the book, and this gathers a lifetime of learning as an artist and teaching around the arts, but that, as we’re breathing right now, we can’t choose. You can’t just say, well, I’m just going to inhale for the next hour. We don’t have that option, and so the way the heart breathes is, when the heart inhales, it feels and perceives, and then it doesn’t really matter how or what way, but I believe that each soul has to discover and inhabit a personal form of expression, and I mean that …
This really broadens the notions of the arts. It’s just not our formal arts or the arts we’re typically used to, I mean, because really, in this sense, everything is an art, you know? Making dinners once a month for your friends is an art, stamp collecting is an art, gardening. Anything you give your whole heart to and that you can express—and what is expressed is not depressed. Let me just say it the other way. What is not expressed is depressed. All this is really about exploring, and I do feel that, chances are, if I devote myself to a whole-hearted form of expression, of personal expression, chances are what comes out will be useful, maybe even beautiful, certainly substantial and strong. But if I strive to create something beautiful, it may not be life-giving.
TS: That’s interesting. Part of what you’re saying is that the striving in and of itself might not deliver in the same way because of the very nature of striving. Can you say more about that?
MN: Yes. I think that one of the things is we’re so, in our modern world … the manufacturing imprint is so insidious on all our endeavors that we turn everything into a product, and I’ve found, for me, that as soon as I do that, I’m in an I/it relationship with it. I’m no longer engaged really, though I’m attending, and not really growing for retrieving it or having it move through me.
My father, as you know, is gone now, about four or five years, but he was a master woodworker, and I remember watching him. It’s interesting. I have all these lessons that are coming after he’s gone, where things that I think he didn’t know he was teaching me and I didn’t know I was learning, but all these years later, “Huh, you know, ah …” And I think one was that I remember being … He had this basement shop where he would always be so happy, working down there on anything. And he used to make … He built this 30-foot catch that I spent a lot of my youth on, but after that, one of his hobbies, his loves, was to get literal blueprints for sailing ships from the 1800s and make scale models of them.
I remember sitting on the basement steps. He didn’t know I was watching him. I might have been nine or ten, and he was so immersed with tweezers, putting little rigging on this ship, you know, and I think what he taught me there. It wasn’t about excellence, it was about immersion. That he gave himself so wholeheartedly that I had this mysterious sense, even as a nine or ten-year-old, that wow, he was in the moment of everyone who ever built a ship. And that was the reward for immersion, was the participation in oneness, and the byproduct was excellence. I can focus on excellence and not really be connected, but if I am immersed wholeheartedly, not only will I be connected, and the byproduct probably will be … It’ll be pretty good.
TS: Now, Mark, one of the things that comes up for me when I hear a phrase like “the life of expression” is: Is it actually possible or even the goal to be fully expressed in every part of your life? Meaning … You talked about your father, and maybe he felt fully expressed in those moments when he was working on these models, but maybe other parts of his life, maybe not so fully expressed, or I think of it more personally. In my own life, there are moments in a day. That was a moment when I really expressed myself. There are lots of other moments where I feel partial, partially expressed in this moment. Partially, partially, partially. I’m curious what you think about this idea of living in a way where we’re fully expressed all the time. Is that even realistic?
MN: Well, I don’t even think that that’s possible, because we are human. So I agree with you, and that’s why I think we really do need to discover and inhabit and relate to a personal form of expression, so that we have a place where it’s more likely to happen than not. Because for me, I don’t believe in a permanent state of enlightenment, or awake all the time, or like you’re saying, fully expressed all the time. And maybe it’s possible, I don’t know, but that’s not been my experience on Earth so far, and so, no. Medieval monks, when asked how they practiced their faith, would say by falling down and getting up. And so yes, that’s been more my experience, that I’m clear today. I might be clear while we’re talking, and I’ll get off and I’ll bumble around, and I won’t be able to express any of this tomorrow, and I’ll probably have to relearn it.
I think that’s why, when we can, and when we’re wholehearted and we hold nothing back, then we come into moments, maybe even long moments, maybe, if we’re blessed, even hours, where we are fully awake, fully present, wholehearted. And then we fall down and then we slip, but when the daylight comes, we can’t see the stars, but having seen them, we can navigate and find our way.
Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher and doctor from the 1100s, one of the things he said is we’re all just like blind travelers who … We see by a flash of lightning and then we make our way in the dark till the next flash. And so that’s why I think it’s even more important to find a way, and also this is interesting, I think, really interesting, that I think our … What I’m drawn to is to want to be thorough, and thorough doesn’t mean … If I say I love you, do you really care if I sing it in perfect pitch or if I cough it, you know? I’m still being thorough, and so what matters more is our wholeheartedness than whether we do it well.
TS: Yes. I mean, it’s beautiful, Mark. I notice, as you offer that answer, there’s a part of me that really softens. Here in a moment of vulnerability, even having a discussion about the life of expression, what comes up for me, and I’m sure you encounter this in all of the teaching work you do with different circles of people who are at different phases of their life of expression, whether it’s their writing life or some part of their creative life. It’s just a feeling of like, God, you know? I wish I was more expressed in this way. I wish I was more expressed, and now I’m talking to Mark, the great … He’s written more than 20 books, but when you talk about this life of expression as coming and going like the sun, and then its disappearance in the night sky, I feel relaxed and invited in instead of less than, and I wonder if listeners might feel that way, too, and your readers.
MN: Well, I think this I—and all my work is about the devotion to the messy, magnificent human journey, and that we can’t get out of it—it’s flawed, it’s beautiful, and it’s everything, and how do we help each other through that? Being expressive doesn’t mean that we’re always vocal, you know? It’s more, I think, an essence of wholehearted presence, however and whenever that appears.
I remember I was once in a group of people. It was people with different callings, but we were professionally sharing our life callings and meeting a couple of times a year for a while, and there was this amazing woman who … She was part of a group. She worked for a nonprofit that would care for orphans of conflicts—in wars and things—and they would just swoop in, and it didn’t matter what side. They weren’t taking sides. They were caring for those left behind, and everybody shared about their work, and then it was her turn, and she was just, she was so quiet.
I mean, she literally didn’t say anything, and everybody, in the circle of about 12 people,
everybody leaned, and giving their full attention, and listening, and listening, and you could see her come from some deep well of experience, and come to the verge of words and then go back, and come and go back, and after about three or four minutes, she hadn’t said a word, Tami. And she saw it, and she said, “That’s all I can share,” and everybody got it. Some mysterious way, even though she couldn’t say a word, she was still beautifully expressive.
TS: That’s a great story. Now, Mark, there’s a quote from the book, Drinking from the River of Light: The Life of Expression, where you’re really setting the stage for some of the unfolding to come, and you write, “All expression has two noble intentions: to try to say what is unsayable and to bear witness to what is,” and I wonder if you can unpack both of those parts, trying to say what is unsayable and to bear witness to what is.
MN: Sure. On the one hand, the saying what is unsayable is I think the purpose of all our—in all our forms—is in some way to try to surface what is essential, what is ineffable, what is under everything. We have the physical world, but in a way, you could say that the roots of all the physical is the invisible. It’s the things that matter, like love, and spirit, and life force, and you can go on and on. Where are they? You can’t hold them. Where are they? They’re like wind. You can’t hold them. Or like light. You can’t see light except for what it illuminates. All the forces that hold us and support us are invisible, so the purpose of metaphor, for instance, is to try to, in a word picture, bring into view what’s hard to see or what’s hard to keep in your view.
I can say that the effort to love that emanates from our heart, what is that like? Well, the first metaphor that comes is like the sun, because the sun emanates light and warmth in all directions within preference, and that’s what our heart does. It emanates love and warmth in all direction without preference, and then, in our humanness, we’re the ones who make decisions. Well, that’s not trustworthy over there, and this person hurt me, but the heart, that inner sun never stops emanating.
How do we talk about the things that matter that you really can’t see? Well, that’s where we’re trying to say what’s unsayable, and let me come back to that in a minute, about the learnings from that journey. But the other, bearing witness is—in the world, in the surface world, and with the beautiful things and the difficult, horrible things that we do to each other—then we’re just asked to bear witness, and I use this in the book. Pablo Neruda, the great Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, when he was in his 30s, he was in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and he saw terrible things. And in a poem of his, he has these lines that say—and he was a master metaphor maker—he had these lines that said “the blood of the children on the sidewalk is like the blood of children on a sidewalk.” And when he powerfully said it there, to me—I mean, I didn’t talk to him, what do I know, but it’s just what it says to me—and what it says to me is, if we use a metaphor there, we’re putting something between us and what we’re bearing witness to, and when something is really right there, our job is to say it as it is. No, no. The blood of children on the sidewalk? You don’t have to go any further. It’s like the blood of children on a sidewalk, which is different than trying to say, well, what is the life force like? How do we say this over here, which is invisible?
Those are, I think, the two major things, and again, not just in creating poetry, but in the language of our relationships, and I think this is at work too. How do we find an honorable way in our relationships, in our intimate lives, in our work lives, to say what is when we see it, and to somehow try to honor in our friendship, and in my love with Susan? And how do I talk about what holds us together that’s not seeable? That’s the metaphor.
So to go back for a minute to that process, when I was a young writer, young poet, and this is, I think, very typical, archetypal. In the beginning, I would see something, and I’d try to say it, and I’d write something, and I’d look at it, and I’d go, “That’s not even close.” I missed. But I could see it. So then I’d try again, and, well, no, that’s not it either. I’d try five, six, seven times, and of course I was learning my craft, learning my art, but in the beginning, that would frustrate me. I’d say, “I see it. Why can’t I match what I’m seeing by what I say?”
But when I was able to understand that the only thing worth writing about and saying is what’s unsayable, when we’re not bearing witness, then it all shifted, and I thought, wow. Now I think, wow. Look how many poems I was gifted by this one thing that’s unsayable, and it’s still there waiting for me to relate to it, but it gave me all these other poems, and that’s what often happens, is it’s a gift that we can’t reach what we’re trying to say or what we see, because of all that it gives us.
TS: One of the things you offer in the new book, Drinking from the River of Light, is various prompts, various writing prompts and suggestions to help people get in there and dig out their own gold, if you will. It’s a metaphor that occurred to me right here. [Laughter] But what would you suggest as some possible prompts for somebody who says, “God, I’m sitting on a vat of unsayable material, I know it, but look, it’s unsayable. How do I get in there and start giving expression to it?”
MN: Well, I think the first thing, and there are a lot … like you said, every chapter has prompts that will help folks personalize all this, . But I would say the first thing is to—if you’re interested in becoming a little more familiar with your own expression, then I would offer, every day, or every other day—first off, start a journal, and it doesn’t have to be, oh my God, a journal. I don’t have time. What am I going to do? You brush your teeth every day and you don’t even think about it, so start out with five minutes, and fine, every other day. And then it’ll become a space that takes up space in your life where you can be in this ongoing conversation between you and life. And then I think the first two ways that I would offer as a practice would be, one is to look before you in the world.
Just look at whatever’s in front of you, and give your full attention to it. Describe it as closely as you can, without any intent of turning it into something magnificent or to have magnificent meaning. Just simply look at what’s before you that is somehow calling you on some detail. A bird, a piece of driftwood, a food wrapper that’s blowing down the sidewalk. Anything, and describe [in as much] detail as you can. That’s the part of bearing witness. That’s practicing bearing witness, and the other is then to look inward. Whatever feeling is moving through you at that moment. It might be contentment, it might be agitation, it might be curiosity. I don’t know what it might be that day—and it might be a tenderness or a vulnerability, like you were saying earlier. Then try to paint that feeling with words, just like you were looking at something outside as detailed as you could.
Just take a few minutes, and just try to describe that feeling that’s invisible but very real, and try to give words, and that’s how a lot of poems have always come to me. I feel something and I go, it’s like, it’s like … what is it … oh, it’s like … and then something shows itself, and then I follow it. I think that that’s a way to start in a very small step to become familiar. Again, going back to about how the heart breathes, it’s this expression. About how the expression of your heart breathes. First is just to not say, “Oh, I’ve got to be creative and create something.” More it’s pay attention and relate to how your heart inhales and exhales by what you move through and by.
TS: You know, one of the interesting sections of the book for me had to do with something that you called “indigenous perception,” in order to describe an experience that you had, and I’d love for you to share that experience with our listeners, and talk about the depth of that level of perception. Because I think, sometimes when you say something like, “Describe what you see,” someone might start out at a certain surface level, but you actually point to a deeper possibility.
MN: I know exactly what you’re talking about with the … I don’t remember the example. Do you remember it?
TS: You were talking about when you were right in the midst of your cancer journey, and an experience you had where you couldn’t move because you would develop a terrible migraine because of a spinal tap.
MN: Oh, yes. Yes.
TS: You were very, very still, very, very present, and then what happened?
MN: Yes. Thank you for the remembering trigger. Yes, so I needed to have a bone-marrow sampling and spinal tap on the same day, which wasn’t fun. And then I was told—I think it’s better today, but this was 30 years ago—and you had to lie still after a spinal tap for six to eight hours so the spinal fluid could regenerate, have time to regenerate. Because otherwise you would quickly get a migraine headache. Well, of course I didn’t stay still, and I got all kinds of headaches, and then finally it was like, “OK, you get it? Don’t move.”
I had to be still for hours, and I was living out where I was living at the time, which was home then, and we had an apple tree out in the front yard, and I’d seen it hundreds of times, but I hadn’t really listened to it, you know? And that’s like, what do you mean, listen to a tree? Well, this is what I mean about the life of expression is not to just mentally perceive it, grasp it, conceptualize it, but to be in relationship to it. It took me being down and being forced not to move to be open to a deeper way of perceiving, in which …
Then I was there, and the tree, not in words, obviously, but the tree really was talking to me, and the tree was saying without saying, “When you get through this, no more making anything up. You’re just going to speak to the miracle of things as they are.” And of course the big thing for me at that time, in the middle of it, was the tree said “when” you get through this, not “if.” That perked me up, but what I mean about indigenous perception is being open to experiencing the life in front of us, visible and non-visible, and being open to more than just the ways we’re already accustomed to listening.
Just within our normal Western perception, I can be narrow, and in a hurry, and not even be open. Then I still myself, and then I can perceive a vastness, but I’m only doing it from my mind. It’s better than being narrow-minded, but that’s only one aspect of perception, and it’s like the example of my father. He wasn’t just trying to be excellent, he was drawn to immerse his whole being, and then so much more came. So I was forced, because of exhaustion and pain, to really be still, to stop naming everything, to stop grasping everything around me, and then I was finally free to be in relationship, in dialog, in felt-dialog, with the things around me, Then all of a sudden, oh, the tree is talking. Well, what does that mean?
Well, I don’t know how to describe what it means, except that I was receiving that there was something going between me and a tree, and Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher talks about this as, I vow that when we are fully present and we regard the things around us as authentic, living centers, that we’re not just the one center. Then, he says, the presence of God comes in the unrehearsed dialog between two living centers. This is how you know, and the Aboriginal, down in Australia, tribes have their notions of song lines, the dream lines of the tribe over generations, to lead them, and dream work, too, comes in here.
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TS: Now, you know, Mark, you’ve been at this a long time, so since that tree spoke to you—no more making things up, just write what you actually experience—but here our listener says I want to go connect in the natural world and write in that kind of way. Not on the surface, but in a deep listening, a deep connection. I know you’ve written a book, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen. How would you recommend that person listen and attune so that their writing isn’t some type of superimposition, but is actually coming from a genuine relatedness?
MN: Well, I think the thing that I would offer is to … I mean, there is a chapter in here that we relate more than we offer. That really what we write is the trail of a conversation with life rather than “I’m creating something out of nothing,” which is, again, a very Western model, where we install ourselves as a tiny replica of God. Say I’m creating, and so I think, in a very real way, it’s like … When I was also starting as a young writer, like everyone, I was taught to look for good material. Well, again, on the other side of my cancer journey, I don’t have to look for material. Everything is miraculous. The miracle is in everything, and what I have to do is be present and move at the pace of what is real, and then all of a sudden, oh.
We all know those moments, when we finally slow down and everything starts to be extra real or glow, and then there’s that light on a branch in the wind that you just can’t stop looking at. For some reason—that branch or that bird—all of a sudden something holds our attention, and just doesn’t hold it, but opens up kind of the connections between things, and so, in that regard, the way I would encourage to really write deeply is that writing is really listening with your heart and taking notes, and all of our intentions are merely kindling for when that comes alive.
One of that hardest things to teach young writers is … Often young writers, you have a vision for a novel, a story, or a poem, or a play, or something, and you work with great enthusiasm and passion, and then it starts to come alive, and it doesn’t go where you thought it was going to go. And usually young writers—and I remember this when I was young—you think, oh, I totally failed. I didn’t do this right, I can’t retrieve it, I can’t make it go where I want it to go. And the hardest thing to teach young writers is, no, that’s when it’s just starting. It’s as if the mystery is saying, “OK, now that I see that you’re really devoting yourself, now I’ll show you where this is really going. Hang on.”
So we are asked to … Churchill said that planning is essential but plans are useless, and I think, for me, that says we plan to ready ourselves, but we need to hold the plans loosely and throw them in the fire when things come alive, and follow, because—and this is where it ties, I mean—this is not just about writing, and why I wanted this to be more deeply about the life of expression. In the Hindu tradition there’s a term, upaguru, which means the teacher that is next to at this moment.
Of course there’s always a teacher next to you at any moment, but when we listen the teacher that we hear, that speaks to us, and we start to record that conversation, that’s when we start to write authentically. And the other thing I would encourage is to—it’s a different form of discipline. Not a “stick to it” that perseveres and is not distracted, but to only write when you’re in your heart. That when you start to slip up into …
TS: Interesting. Interesting.
MN: Yes, when you start to slip up to your mind, drop it. Drop it, and take in anything else. Do something else until you can return to your heart. So you see, even after all of these books and all of my doing, for me, discipline is very different than it was as a younger writer, because I can stay in that space for days. That’s not the … But that manufacturing imprint is so great on all of us, even me, after all this time, so I’m working, and what do I want to do when I “work”? I want to enter time. I don’t want to move through it or by it, I want to enter, so when I’m in it—that feeling, that is timeless.
When I’m in there, like, oh my God, where’d the day go, and there I’m listening, and I’m relating, and I’m growing, and I’m challenged, and then, OK, I’m working. I’m home, and my wife, Susan, she’s a potter, and she’s in her studio, where she is right now. So we work for the day, and then say—which we typically do—we come up and meet for dinner. An hour before that, all of a sudden, I’m aware now that we’re going to meet for dinner, and then all of a sudden I have this thought. Well, if I really focus here, maybe I’ll finish this chapter before dinner.
Discipline now is not doing that. Discipline is, as soon as I’ve had that thought, it’s now become an “it.” It’s now become a product. I’m no longer in time, I’m now managing time. I’m no longer listening, I’m controlling, and so now discipline, for me, at this point in my life, is as soon as I’m aware that I’ve had that thought, I’m done. Drop it. Walk away, pick it up later or tomorrow, when I can come back to my heart.
TS: Well, first of all, it’s the first definition of discipline I’ve ever liked and ever thought I could actually align with, in my heart. How do you return to your heart? I mean, is it a feeling, like, I know. Is it just that? Like, oh, this is a recognizable feeling, and I’m there or I’m not there. Can you evoke it?
MN: Yes, well, how I return to my heart is to lean in, hold nothing back, and return to being completely present to whatever’s before me, and one of the things that is difficult in our modern age is the avalanche of preferences we bury ourselves under. I don’t read movie reviews anymore. I don’t watch trailers because I don’t want … It takes us away from the wonder of just being here. If I see a bad play, and you and I can argue, say, “What a bad play.” That’s still a live play, and what a wonderful thing to be able to come out and say that it was terrible, or if I hear music—this is one of the things—I’m not objecting to the music company, the app Pandora, but the principle under it. You know how Pandora works. You play something you like, and then it will refer you to something else you’ll like. Well, then, how do I ever hear anything I’ve never heard before? How do I ever grow? One of the ways that I think we all return to our heart is to welcome life without preferences, you know? We’ve got to look at 14 reviews of a restaurant before we go. Well, that’s not … Just go and eat, and if it’s no good, well, that’s an experience. That’s fine.
Because while it might be more pleasant to exercise our preferences, I find that I am more half-hearted the more I obey my preferences, and I’m more wholehearted when I can just meet experience without a preview or a review, you know. And that makes things more real. So another part of renewing my heart is just calling up a friend, and tell me a story. Anything. Just anything that’s not me. I need to take something in, read something I’ve never read, hear something I’ve never heard, see something I’ve never seen, and that, the wonder of that, will almost always refresh my wholeheartedness.
TS: One of the things that made a big impact on me when I was reading Drinking from the River of Light is that in your writing, you’re not so much approaching it as a way to share your answers, like, “I have these answers. I have these things I’ve experienced. I want to put them down and share them with other people.” But you’re exploring questions, things you’re curious about, things you don’t know. That’s interesting. I wonder how many people approach writing that way.
MN: Well, for me, this is very—and I’m amazed that I’ve written all these books. This is way beyond anything I imagined. I’m very grateful, but I think really the key to my being prolific has been that turn years ago, when I write about what I need to know, not what I know. And the way I learn, the words are the trail of the inquiry, and if I had written about just what I know, I would have written very little. I think this is something wonderful that I think you support with Sounds True, that whether it’s the books, or the tapes, or whatever, it is about the life of questions and conversations, and that that’s what brings us alive. And it’s changed how I understand questions, because questions in the world of circumstance have answers, like what time are we going to begin this interview, and what’s the expiration date on milk, and when do I pick up my prescription?
Those are real answers to things in the world of circumstance, but in the world of essence, in the world of meaning and the world of spirit, questions don’t have answers. We ask questions the way we would open a door we want to walk through with someone. Questions lead to relationships, not answers. Questions in the inner world are like throwing a log on a fire to keep each other warm, or questions are like a lantern we swing so we can see a few steps ahead of us. And so I have a poem. I think it’s in The Way Under the Way, that begins, “When someone says to me, get to the point, I stop talking because there’s no relationship.”
TS: Yes. Related to this, this is one of the quotes I pulled out from the book: “The truth is, I barely understand half of what comes through me. The other half leads me.” I thought, what a level of trust that is, to write in that way, where you’re really opening up to something that comes through me. “I barely understand half of what comes through me. The other half leads me.”
MN: Well, and this is where I feel, and again, that’s why I use my experience as an artist and a writer and a teacher to open up in this book what I feel is a process of learning, and inhabiting, and relationship that’s basic to the human journey. That’s what I think is so valuable for me about what I’ve been able to retrieve—which I say I retrieve my books rather than author them—so I feel like what I write becomes my teacher. I trust my heart’s authenticity that, yes, I have to retrieve this because there’s something here. My heart is like a Geiger counter that says, “No, don’t walk by this.” Then I have to be with it so I can, over time, understand it. And that’s another myth, is just because I write it doesn’t mean that I have the meaning of it all.
There’s a wonderful … Denise Levertov. I don’t know if you remember her work. She was a British poet, British-American poet, who died maybe eight years ago. Wonderful, wonderful poet, and she has this great poem called “The Secret,” where she’s speaking at a college, and before the reading, two giddy young college young women come up to her and say, “Oh my God, thank you, thank you,” and they thank her because they’ve discovered the secret of life in a line in one of her poems, and then they run off, and she says, “But wait a minute. You didn’t tell me the secret, or the poem, or even what the line is. Wait. Come back.” And what’s beautiful there is that, yes, we discover meaning together. Today maybe I retrieve it and you have the insight into what it means, and tomorrow I have the insight and you retrieve it, and so, yes.
I’m trying to think of an example in a poem of mine. I have a poem called “The Industry of No” (N-O), which just goes on about that there’s more no than yes. Rather than saying yes to life, everywhere we go, there’s no, and it goes on, and on, and on, and all of sudden, at the end, there’s this surprising image that—I knew it was the end of the poem—that even though there’s a seminar, and people are doing all this research, and [inaudible 00:48:21] and all that, but then the image at the end of the poem is, “but they all went home and dreamt of white geese flapping in the ancient air.” And I knew that that was the end of the poem. I don’t know where it came from, but I knew that was the end of the poem. So I trusted that, and I wrote that, and then, over time, I had to be with it to learn what it was trying to say to me. And so I’ve learned over time that this is what it was saying to me. I had to look into birds and geese and how they fly, and what I discovered was, when a bird fully spreads its wings, it has to lead with its chest. It has to lead with its heart. It can’t open its wings completely without exposing its chest or its heart. That’s amazing. I couldn’t have made that up. I’m not that smart.
All of this talk of no, and because I was true to the feeling, the reward at the end of the poem was this image, which was teacher. Even for all of our conscious and mental “no, no, no,” nothing extinguishes our deep want to lead with our heart.
TS: You know, Mark, one of the things I’m curious about is when a younger writer comes up with the draft, and it’s clear that they haven’t gone deep enough in some way—there’s some way that they’re still on the surface of what it is they’re trying to uncover or retrieve—and how you would point that person to hold less back, in a certain way, or deepen their retrieval process. I’m sure you’ve had lots of interactions like this with people who have shown you manuscripts, and you have this sense like, you know, they’re on the trail, but they’ve got to go further. How do you help someone go further?
MN: Well, two suggestions that I know because … and I know a lot of these things because I [inaudible 00:50:46] all the time. It’s how I’ve learned. So I’ve been there, and I do that, and it still happens occasionally, after all this time. I think two things that I try to do when I see someone else or I find myself in that place is the word revision. We have made it very small. Revision today means being economical, pruning, taking out excess words, fine-tuning, but the word revision really means go back to the original vision and look again. But if you’re not quite there, go back to the heart of whatever the expression is about, and get closer, and get stiller, and put your defenses down, and ask questions of it, and get closer. Because I have found that, over time, that the closer I am to the source of whatever I’m trying to express, the less I have to do with the words.
That the farther away I am, the more I’ve got to work with the language, and I work on things to make sure they’re accessible as possible. But now what I do is, if something is difficult and isn’t working, rather than spend all this time trying to reshape it, it’s a sign to me I wasn’t really open or my heart wasn’t really there in the first place, so I have been in the right dive spot, but I need to go back. I need to go back and have a more open heart, and see what comes then. I can’t remember what the other thing was right now. I mentioned two, but it’s escaped me right now.
TS: One thing I’ve heard you say, and when you mentioned it to me, it stuck with me because it’s a word I love so much, but you talked about people having a certain fidelity, that’s the word, to their journey, and how important that is, and that if you steer away from that, that you can get lost on the surface of things.
MN: Yes. Well, one of the paradoxes, and I talk about this in the book, too, is that our fidelity, and by that I mean that we’re honoring … it’s like a covenant with our own soul’s journey. A covenant with our—not any one expression, again, not a product, not a poem, not a story, not a—but a covenant and a commitment to the life. And we’re back to that. To the life of our expression, to where that comes from and goes, not any one product of it. It involves always giving attention more than getting attention.
I think, when I look back, I think I really started writing as a way to keep the wonder in the view a little bit longer. I would see something, or feel something, or be like, whoa, or have an a-ha, and then it would start to disappear, go back into the fabric of life. And I’d go, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, I don’t quite have it. Don’t go, or this feels really good, I don’t want this feeling to end.” And so I think I started to write as a way to keep whatever it was in view a little longer. Giving attention, recognizing and verifying, is what livens our wonder, our curiosity and our enthusiasm, and being in the world, we spend a lot of time getting attention.
Now, some of that is necessary as a life skill, but it’s not a worldview to live by. It’s a skill that has its proper place, but when we get attention, and we want to be recognized and verified, when that starts coming in the foreground, we lose our connection to wonder, and then we start seeking attention rather than giving it. I mean, it’s interesting that, with our current society, we have everyone wanting to be celebrity when we’re all secretly aching for something to celebrate. There’s this tension between giving and getting attention. That’s not to say, oh, we all should be hermits and not care. No, no. We’re in the world. It’s fine. It’s fine to be open, and up there, and devoted to your path professionally, whatever it might be, but that’s secondary, I have found, to the journey of sustaining our wonder.
Again, whenever we feel like half-hearted, or discombobulated, one of the things we can do is give our attention to whatever is before us. Just give our whole attention, and recognize and verify whatever is before us, and then the connections between everything start to appear again, and then our feeling—we get back to that indigenous perception. We just don’t see it, and then we start to feel it. I mean, I think joy can be understood in one way as the sensation of wonder.
The heart is like a tuning fork. I can give attention and listen and be present and wholehearted, however briefly. To go back to our original part of our conversation, no one can do it all the time but, however briefly, then all of a sudden being like a tuning fork. I feel that I’m a living part in a living universe, and that kind of—however brief it is—is a sensation of joy. And that’s more important than … That’s the real poem. It’s not the words on the page. That’s just the trail.
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TS: Okay, Mark. There was one part of the book where I had this question mark that I wrote down in the margin, and I thought, huh, I don’t know what I think about this. And even in this conversation you brought it up, and it’s this idea that creativity can be creating something from nothing. And in this conversation, you said that’s kind of a Western notion, where we’re the great creators, and we’re making something out of nothing, and in the book you talk about …
Here’s the quote. “I realized that everything we create already exists somewhere in nature as an elemental form.” There’s another quote. “Your need to create is less about inventing something new than it is inhabiting a timeless form,” and I thought to myself, but wait a second. I’ve never been here quite like this before, in this body, in this time, in this configuration. It could be something new happening here. It might not just be discovering something timeless that’s always existed in nature some way. This could be a new moment, and anyway, I’m curious what you think about that.
MN: I believe in yes, and, so yes to what you’re saying and to what I’m saying, and how they might yet present a third, inclusive sense, the paradox that holds both of it. I do think, obviously, from what I’m sharing there, that in some ways, in some—and this is the difference, I guess, between incarnation and progress, OK? I was exploring this the other day, so it’s kind of interesting how this comes up. I think the part that is timeless is the fact that …
Oh, here’s a little story that maybe will hold a little of this. I was trying to think of something that would convey this. Imagine there’s a community, a tribe. They’re emigrating from oppression. They go into the wilderness and the forest, and they get into a safe place, they climb to a plateau out in the Rockies, somewhere where there’s a plateau, and they settle there, that generation, and they clear all the trees so that they live there. For now, for the next generations, this is the home for this community.
Their kids are born with that view of that vastness, and that’s new. Their parents’ generation cleared that land so their kids could be born with that vastness always available to them. That’s progress. At its best, we do stand on the shoulders of giants who came before us, and the best of progress is to leave something that wasn’t there before for the next generation. They traipsed through those woods, they saw the possibility, and they did their hard toil to create it so their kids, without doing anything, were just born with it.
The timeless part—there where everything that’s ever been—is our incarnation, and that, for me, is that wisdom doesn’t give us shortcuts. Wisdom supports us that every person who’s ever lived, from cave times till now, to people a hundred years from now, 500 years from now, will have to go through the same human journey, and everyone gets a chance at their incarnation, at their turn at doing and facing and dealing with everything from birth, to death, to loss, to grief, to friendship, to betrayal, to tenderness, to vulnerability—all the archetypes.
In that respect, everything that we encounter and create through meeting life has, in one way … We might do it in a slightly different way. Just like there are only so many notes, right, to music, and yet all the variations of music that are created just from those eight notes. In one way, it’s unique, but in another way, it’s all coming from the same notes. That’s about as far as I’ve gotten with it so far.
TS: Yes. I think what I really like about your answer is the yes, both and yes, yes, and a way to hold so many different perspectives at one time. That’s one of the things I really appreciate about you and your work, Mark.
MN: Well, thank you. There’s one more about this that comes to mind quickly that is not mine, but I’m recalling. This is a metaphor from the early third century Christian mystic Desert Fathers, and this is how they talked about this unique and commonness, and they evoked the metaphor of a wagon wheel, and they said every spoke is like a soul on Earth, and so, in the wheel, as you grow into your becoming, no two people or spokes or souls occupy the same space on the rim. Everyone has a unique place to hold up the rim, and the rim is community.
But in our being, when I go into my center, we all meet in the same hub, in the center, so I go deep enough into me, I find you, and you go deep enough into you, you find me, and what’s beautiful about that metaphor, it explains our uniqueness, and our commonness and newness, as well as this is timeless, but you take any one of those things out, you’ve got no wheel. Without the center, whatever you name the center, it falls apart. You take the spokes out, it falls apart, and without a rim, it’s not a wheel.
TS: Alright. Finally, Mark, I would love it if you would unpack for our listeners the title of this new book on the life of expression, Drinking from the River of Light. Where did that come from?
MN: This is a wonderful story because, as we were getting the book closer and closer to being finished, and I had a working title that was [inaudible 01:05:23] and you, Tami, and Haven were asking me, well, could I be with it and see if there was a … like you just said about going to a poem, and you’re there, but you’re not quite there. You guys asked me, well, could I be open to seeing if there was a title that felt more right to me?
I was open to that, and I remember saying let’s not lose the working title in case we didn’t stumble onto one, and then last summer I went to England to speak, and I happened to be speaking in St James’s church, which is where William Blake was baptized. Well, for a poet, that was quite a thing. I was speaking at night, and I purposely went to the Tate Gallery, which has a room of Blake originals, because I wanted to spend time in there during the day before actually going to the church and being there, and so I was in this Blake room of originals.
I spent three hours there, and I know a lot about Blake, but I also learned something I didn’t know, which was … and this was wonderful. That his creative energy and ambition is he wanted to do etchings, 107 etchings that illustrated Dante’s Divine Comedy, and he did sketches for all of them, but he only had time before he passed away to do six or seven, but … They had some of them there, and I’m walking along, and there is a sketch of Dante drinking from the river of light, and just like we mentioned earlier, seeing light on a branch that you can’t walk by, it kind of holds you, or a bird. This sketch, I couldn’t walk from.
I sat down in front of it, and I kept looking at it and looking at it, and it became kind of alive, you know, and I was in conversation with it, and then I thought, wow, not knowing it, I think he did a self-portrait here. This is Blake drinking at the river of light. And then I kept sitting there, and all of a sudden I had this rush of adrenaline. I said, you know, I think that’s a self-portrait of me, and any artist or writer, this is kind of like a moment here. And so I sat there and was with that, and that’s where the title came, Drinking from the River of Light, because when we are—that river of light is the life force that’s running through all living things, and how do we drink from that river? It’s through whatever meaningful, personal form of expression we can discover and inhabit. That’s how I came upon it. And I remember emailing Haven from the Tate when I realized that that was the title.
TS: I remember receiving it, Drinking from the River of Light, and writing in all caps, with an exclamation point, “YES!” It’s beautiful. Beautiful title for a book by Mark Nepo on the life of expression. Also with Sounds True, Mark has written the book Things That Join the Sea and the Sky: Field Notes on Living, a book that won the Nautilus Book Award, and was also cited by Spirituality & Health magazine to be one of the best spiritual books of 2017.
Mark is one of the future presenters at the upcoming Sounds True Gathering, which benefits the Sounds True Foundation. It’s taking place the end of September, and Sounds True has also published a collection of three books of poems by Mark Nepo called The Way Under the Way. And Mark, you’ve now introduced me to a definition of discipline that I think will both improve my writing and my life, so thank you so much. You’re such a heart-centered communicator. It’s a gift. Thank you.
MN: Well, thank you, Tami. You know it’s a joy. It’s a journey with you and the whole Sounds True family.
TS: Thank you for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at soundstrue.com/podcast, and if you’re interested, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app, and also, if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I love getting your feedback, being in connection with you, and learning how we can continue to evolve and improve our program. Working together, I believe we can create a kinder and wiser world. SoundsTrue.com: waking up the world.
